Alpes-Maritimes: the quiet French Riviera

High in the hills behind the French Riviera is the old-world antidote to the flashy hubbub of the coast: a pocket of cobbled towns where the air is deliciously cool and the sky is rosé pink

Oleander in St-Paul-de-Vence

Michael Paul

People travel to Cannes and Antibes for the aura of blue heat and bon viveurs, for the sight of super-yachts lazing with the threatening indolence of star destroyers. But there comes a moment when the beach umbrellas and bodies stretched out hundreds to the acre, turning and oiling themselves, begin to pall.

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That's the moment to follow the back roads leading into the hills, northwards to the interior, up to the rim of the Alpes-Maritimes. Here, gently rising into ridges of steep mountains, towns and villages sit on summits keeping vigil over the coast before and the lavender fields of Provence behind, and all the olive and flower groves in between.

Originally built on Roman (and some much older) remains around castle keeps, many of these towns thrived for centuries on the production of perfumes, only becoming depopulated and falling into ruin in the late 19th century. But, being so alluringly close to the riviera, their fortunes were restored from the 1920s by enraptured writers and actors, painters and movie directors. 'The purpose of art is to create enthusiasm,' said Picasso, whose presence still hangs over the area as powerfully as the scent of jonquils on the air, which soon overwhelms any aromas of salt and the sea as you head towards…

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Postcards in Tourrettes-sur-Loup

Michael Paul

GRASSE

A mild haze lies over the town, the warm air now infused with the promise of moules simmering in white onion and crates of ripely bruised, yellow-striped melons stacked along the streets off the place aux Aires.

Clinging to the rising mountains, with modest châteaux and hidden gardens, Grasse is quite dilapidated, certainly not so gorgeous you will ever feel overwhelmed. But this is its vast charm. You are expected to do nothing here but traverse the commune from west to east (it scarcely takes long), past cafés selling crêpes for lunch and, in the early-evening, delicious steak tartare heaped, unusually, in bowls, to be eaten with a spoon.

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Swing east, past boxes of cashews and salt on the edges of the Arabic quarter, painted orange and pink and hung with washing like the backstreets of Delhi or Naples, and then down to rue Dominique Conte, where old men drink beer outside the tabac and couples sip Château Grand Boise rosé directly opposite in Au Comptoir, the town's best bar à vins. Next door, a bookshop sells great, age-damp tomes on Edith Piaf (she died in Grasse) and in Atelier Diana, an emporium behind, I find a long-folded original poster for the 1930 Josef von Sternberg masterpiece The Blue Angel, featuring Marlene Dietrich gorgeously painted as though with dove-grey smoke. (You can still rootle out these sorts of bargains in the Alpes-Maritimes. I once bought an immaculate 1933 poster of Buster Keaton here for the spare change I had in my pocket.)

There are lanes of magnolia and daphne and small, monastic windows from which the aspect hasn't much changed since 1400

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Down on rue de l'Oratoire the master perfumers trade floral oils and tinctures out of tiny, cave-like distilleries. Once known for its leather, Grasse became a perfume centre in the 17th century and several major fragrance houses still whirl with commerce. In the fields around the city, hosts of violets and jasmine unfold their glory (there's rarely a time in these towns when a flower festival isn't gearing up or winding down). For my money, the more modest perfumers are the best. Take Monsieur Gaglewski at number 12, with his pale, fine hands, who tells me he works on just one new fragrance a year, his desk covered in little phials of opopanax and vetiver, hop blossom and tuberose. This year's perfume, he says, will be the most unusual and brilliant yet, and will evoke 'a man working with motor engines, the sense of oil on the skin, using distilled birch and juniper…' For now, the scent is only in his head, invisible, intangible, and he returns preoccupied to his desk.

There is a cathedral in Grasse and a Saracen tower, but no building here feels over-commanding. It is a place concerned with the nose not the eyes, with fragranced pomades and soaps, creams and bandoline. Houses and streets simply wind and spill relaxedly down the hill towards the most perfectly lost, deep gorge filled with apple trees: chemin des Vallonets. Flowers were once stored here in stone barns, along with crates stuffed with spices, and kegs of vinegar and mimosa. These days - if you can find it - you can sit among the ruins and not see a soul for hours, just listening to the sounds of milling crowds bouncing off the ramparts above until the evening when windows start to hang, lantern like, across the town.

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Dinner on the terrace at La Colombe d'Or in St-Paul

Michael Paul

WHERE TO STAY

Pantarou A beautiful stone farmhouse with six bedrooms, folded into the evergreen ravine beneath the city. With a pool edged by magnolia, this place is bliss to return to after mooching around the streets above. Breakfast on chilled melon and tea made with mint from the garden. +33 9 88 66 44 25. Doubles from about £75

La Bastide Saint-Antoine This classic, elegant hotel always seems to be buzzing with weddings and anniversary parties, excited laughter oozing across immaculate lawns upon which handsome staff serve canapés. At night, guests dress for dinner and a delectable fuss is made. Doubles from about £185

The former home of Jacques Prevert in St-Paul

Michael Paul

CABRIS & SPERACEDES

Balanced on a high promontory extending south from the Plan de Provence hills, the small villages of Cabris and Spéracèdes offer head-lolling views to Nice and Cannes. Pretty and modest, windy and relatively cool, Cabris has tennis courts on allée Albert Camus where on Saturday mornings schoolboys cheat like mad, out-outraging each other, while the church opposite starts its fourth baptism of the day. Who wouldn't want to christen their Provençal child here, in this chapel of white stone and sunlight? Behind the font is the smiling statue of St Marie des Sources wearing a dress as orange as an amour-en-cage, her body twisting with happiness.

Around the corner on rue Fredéric Mistral, Madame Garre, owner of the boulangerie, patisserie and salon de thé since 1966, lays out gooey, sticky meringues like gigantic apricot-pink clouds on a ceramic serving dish, and in the back beside the oven an onion-and-courgette tart sits, thick as a sofa, cooling on a rack. High cobbled streets overhang with rosemary, and teenage girls swing their ponytails, carrying baguettes and fresh eggs past the pharmacy, which sells local-honey lozenges and walking sticks hand-carved from neighbourhood cedar.

Tiny Spéracèdes lies further down the hill, its banks covered in silvery olive trees. In the main square, a drinking trough trickles water through lichen and blue flowers, and the fierce late-summer wind flings dried leaves against half-open shutters, ancient and warped, bent out of shape in the windows of slightly dishevelled houses: some modestly middle-class, some terribly old and beautiful, suggesting long-ago hidden riches.

There is water everywhere around here, no matter how hot it gets. Friends in these villages and further down the slope towards Grasse speak of springs appearing overnight, unchannelled brooks mysteriously spurting and gurgling in fields and back gardens. At Café de l'Union in the centre of the village - the whole commune tilts around this place - I drink a very cheap and deliciously hydrating rosé while the tables fill up for early lunch: charcuterie and sliced aubergine served to whole families who quietly read the local paper. Nothing but the sound of wind and collared doves.

The [i

Michael Paul

Venus dans le vide[/i] sculpture in Mougins]

MOUGINS

Like the dream of a French hill town, the pretty lanes of Mougins blow with the fat petals of white roses, and some of the 14th- century ramparts are covered in a filigree-light ivy that never stops quivering, as though the stones themselves are breathing. Picasso lived here for 12 years at the end of his life; Cocteau, Man Ray and Léger used to visit too, and Yves St Laurent resided in the former post office. When Liz Taylor was in her pomp - at her most luscious-tanned, mid-Burton and sugary - Mougins was a favourite place for lunch; she'd moor her yacht in Nice and motor up the hill.

Everywhere you look there are fancy restaurants and shops selling paintings. An occasional Mercedes from the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc with blacked-out windows ferries couples home after a great feast of roasted crayfish tails and too many G&Ts. But even in high season the restaurants close at 3pm. You eat. You stop eating. You walk. Past the fortified gate and pre-Roman remains, past the rows of low medieval mantles, and up and down streets winding ever-tightly around. There are cascades of trumpet flowers and pots of plump lavender and plaques to people half-forgotten. And everywhere the imprint of Picasso, who painted the walls of his hotel when he first pitched up (the landlady was furious), and died here in 1973. In the photography museum he can be seen in shot upon framed shot: pretending to be in a bullfight; smoking in a Breton shirt; topless in the bath. Always the same expression: internally furnaced, and with a thrilling lack of consideration for anything but that moment, that intense exchange between photographer - often a lover - and subject.

The best hours in Mougins are the ones between lunch and supper, when the fierceness of the gastronomic olfactory experience recedes briefly to reveal the simple smell of moist stones and moss. On rue du Maréchal, Madame Raimbault locks up her shop with its cartons of sweet tomato puree, and outside the Musée d'Art Classique someone tacks up a notice for a talk that night on Roman forts. Ducking inside the 11th-century church of Saint-Jacques le Majeur to light a candle, I find local soprano Madame Touraine practising the 'Gloria' by Vivaldi, keeping cool with a green fan, her hair a decadent frizz. Outside, the sound of tables being laid for supper and the clink of cutlery starting to rise from terraces below. 'When is the concert?' I ask. 'Oh…' she shrugs whimsically, 'in the future.' On the high white walls around us there are baroque lutes and harpsichords in a riot of happy gold.

WHERE TO STAY

Le Mas Candille The views across a verdant valley from the rooms and dining terrace here give a sense of almost floating. The Shiseido spa, set among high bamboo, vetiver and lavender, is the best in the region. Doubles from about £140

A chateau in Tourrettes-sur-Loup

Michael Paul

TOURRETTES-SUR-LOUP

'Tourrettes is damp,' someone complained to me, darkly, in Mougins, 'and Grasse smells of industry.' I demur. Pointless to contradict. Each of the towns in the Alpes-Maritimes believes powerfully in its own superiority, each looking out towards the other, suspiciously through a sun-irradiated mist.

Tourettes-sur-Loup is, I think, the most romantic of the towns. The most remote-seeming and out of the way - too high up for the tourist coaches - and with only around 4,000 residents. A heart-stopping jumble of Romanesque towers and courtyards, steps and doorways and sun-bleached stone, where the sides of the lanes are bashed by fat, drowsy bumblebees drugged by the pure, bright air.

These are lanes of magnolia and daphne, mingling with ancient clay pipes and electrical wires from the 1950s, the small, monastic windows of apartments hung with raggedy lace curtains from which the aspect hasn't much changed since 1400. And green everywhere; beneath cobbles, the tinkling of hidden streams. The whole commune balances on the southern slope of the Puy de Tourrettes, a rocky spur above the most nauseatingly vertiginous swoon into a lush gorge dive-bombed by swallows.

In the distance, the view of the riviera - the inexorably indolent, blue sea - convinces you summer could never end. This is perhaps the strangest thing about the Alpes-Maritimes: there dangles the Mediterranean, almost always in sight, so close you can even trace the movement of a certain yacht or a speedboat whizzing to Juan-les-Pins, and yet there is nothing maritime-seeming about the towns. Nothing salt-bloated or sandy. They appear to exist in a kind of self-contained equanimity that implies you are not just half an hour but several days from the coast.

Inside what was once a cave for a donkey on the Grand Rue but now a place to make porcelain, I talk with the potter Monsieur Vigroux as he paints the heads of violets onto bowls. A proud Tourettans, he says he will never leave and that things have pretty much stayed the same since he was a child. Until very recently, he remembers, there was a shepherd in the hills around the town who sold honeycomb and pistachios from a leather bag.

Sea bass at La Colombe d'Or

Michael Paul

The morning stretches out. Occasionally, Monsieur Vigroux shifts forward in his chair, preparing to heave to his feet to fetch more paint. On the steps of the house opposite, a woman sits pitting yellow plums. When eventually I mention I'm thinking of heading on to St Paul de Vence, Monsieur Vigroux snorts. 'That's not a village! It's for tourists! There is no boulangerie.'

WHERE TO EAT

La Cave de Tourrettes There is an awful lot of Michelin-star faffing at restaurants throughout the Alpes-Maritimes, and yet the food can be average. La Cave feels like the right answer: a small bar-restaurant with a tiny terrace (it seats 12) balanced over a deep ravine looking out towards the sea. The food is rustic (pork with a red-onion confit; poached peaches with crème de café) but delicious in the extreme, and served with the best Provençal wines, such as the Rimauresq Cru Classé 2014, an apricot-shade rosé, crisp as the air in the town. About £45 for two

Dining room at La Colombe d'Or

Michael Paul

ST-PAUL-DE-VENCE

The second most visited village in France after Mont-St-Michel, St-Paul has an almost unnatural brilliance. Approached from the valley below, it surges from the rocks like a citadel in a Sixties Ladybird book about knights and Saracen invaders. So many of its original features have been preserved: the 16th-century ramparts, the arcades, the wells (until 15 years ago all the fountains were fed by a local stream). After a ferocious marketing drive which began in the 1980s, now upwards of two million visitors a year force themselves along these thread-like streets in a purling stream from May to October: grannies from Luxembourg buying posters of Giacometti, Portuguese teenagers plugged into portable tours, seas of straw hats and protesting Canadians and Belgian fathers pushing triple strollers, comparing notes on their drive up from Antibes.

It wasn't always this way (long-time residents tear their hair out) but the town was always well off, always loved, known for its famous visitors and residents. Here, the fountain where Churchill liked to sit and paint; there, the grave of Chagall, covered in rosemary and surrounded by ancient cypresses. But it is true, there is no boulangerie any more. The shops are given over almost entirely to ice cream and expensive watercolours, and the cobbles are not ancient at all but relatively recently laid. Still, in the early mornings, a market just beyond the medieval walls sells leeks and parsley, melons and sunflowers, and on some days pétanque is played seriously outside Twenties café-hotel La Colombe d'Or, where Hitchcock came to finish writing To Catch a Thief and where the walls are hung with paintings by Matisse and Braque, personal gifts from the artists. Yves Montand, Simone Signoret, James Baldwin: they all stayed here, sometimes for months at a time.

By 1pm the garden terrace of this deeply glamorous hotel is crammed with ageing boulevardiers who've skipped food altogether and are smoking; slim-armed wives humour their ruthlessly bad-tempered elderly husbands with another iced bucket of fizz as prawns are brought out on great silver platters. I sit and binge on dorade with Pitou, granddaughter of Monsieur Roux, who built this place against all advice in a field he had inherited just after World War I using materials he bought from house sales in villages decimated by the fighting.

'Montand…' shrugs Pitou, dreamily, as I mine her for information, 'he was Montand. He met Simone here. Jacques Prévert was here for so long, so many months, so many times. My grandmother would make him food in the bar.' As the afternoon thickens, the garden around us seems lined with an increasingly pretty and burning universe of trees and flowers. Inside, in a dark corner, I find a photograph of Pitou taken some time in the unrecoverable 1960s, wearing flares and a smile, blonde hair skimming her thighs, arm around some old guy chomping on a cigar. I think it's Miró. Further along in the picture is Montand, squinting and raising a glass in the sun.

Later I ask Pitou about Picasso. Is it true he gave a painting in exchange for a bowl of soup? Pitou roars with laughter. No, it's not true, despite what the guidebooks say. So how did they get the painting that hangs inside? The fading light in the garden pools around Pitou's feet. She shrugs. 'In 1953 my grandfather said to my grandmother, "Go down and ask Pablo."' And she did.

Calder mobile beside the pool at La Colombe d'Or

Michael Paul

Entrance of La Colombe d'Or

Michael Paul

WHERE TO STAY

La Colombe d'Or This is seemingly everyone's first choice, so it's not easy to get in, but its unpompous air of heritage-prestige really cannot be beaten. A sign over the entrance reads 'Here we lodge those on foot, on horseback or with paintings.' Where else can you breakfast under works by Léger and Delaunay or look out from one of the 25 small, sweet bedrooms to the pool, over which a giant Calder mobile dances? Doubles from about £190

Orion Treehouse A handful of giant treehouses set in a forest around a fresh-water pool fed by a stream and surrounded by irrigating plants (a vision of eco-fabulousness). With wooden baths, wafting muslin and ingenious rope bowers, they call to mind Tarzan and Jane's suspiciously comfortable domicile in the 1933 Johnny Weissmuller films. Doubles from about £115

Le Mas de Pierre This hotel is just outside town, so guests are ferried back and forth to shop and promenade in a Phantom Rolls-Royce, a hint at the delighted grandness of the place, which seems built for long lunches with Champagne, followed by a reviving spritzer. Doubles from about £145

A fountain in Biot

Michael Paul

BIOT

I first visited this town 15 years ago during the Cannes Film Festival and spent the whole time drowsing in a chair, wrecked by the sorts of terrible meetings that go nowhere and confusing parties where everybody drinks themselves into a deeply unwell sobriety.

Biot was the cure-all - a balm - yet so absurdly close to the facelifts and valanced chaises-longues and beaches of the Croisette. I've seen girls stepping off scooters on the main street of the village so fresh from the sea they've stood wringing their sopping hair with vigorous hands like Titian's Venus. Once the domain of the Knights Templar, some of the town's 12th-century fortifications remain, and the existence of the Eglise de Sainte Marie Madeleine - which you enter down several steps, like some gigantic wine cellar - calls to mind the Templar belief in the importance of Mary Magdalene as perhaps the lover of Christ.

Bunting in Biot

Michael Paul

In the oldest streets here, houses stand so close together there is meagre space left for passageways, which might force everyone to jostle when the town is busy, but it rarely is, clinging to its homely little slope, its shops selling cakes and handsomely heavy-blown coloured glass, the restaurants serving simple salade Niçoise and plates of sea urchins. In the winding back lanes, cats doze on the plateforme panoramique, and a rooster crows and crows. For hours, someone expertly practises piano in a room nearby.

Outside one house, in the warren of 14th-century lanes off the main drag, is my favourite feature in all the Alpes-Maritimes: a medieval doorknocker shaped like a monkey contorted to hold its tail. Every time I come back I go looking for it, squashing figs and lime underfoot and nosing into windows that seem modest but actually give onto exquisite little gardens of oleander and apricot. One windy evening, wine-dark and perfectly warm, a wedding party passes by like a carnival, trailing excited children and real-blossom confetti. The village knife-sharpener comes out of his shop to watch, waving a chef's hatchet he's been working on, in salutation.

WHERE TO STAY

Hôtel Les Arcades Staying here is almost a rite of passage: the shabby, garret-like rooms a thing of legend, the staff (famously and magnificently rude) perpetually trying to calculate unpaid bills, smoke coming out their ears. Doubles from about £45

GETTING HERE

British Airways (britishairways.com) flies from Heathrow and Gatwick to Nice. Be warned: getting around the Alpes-Maritimes without a car or scooter is impossible. Taxis are so expensive it's as if the driver plucks the absurd sum at random. Buses exist but are hilariously irregular.